LYDIA CORNELL: Author, actress, comedienne, talk show host, inspirational pubic speaker, best known as the star of ABC's "Too Close for Comfort" as TV legend Ted Knight's daughter; HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, and over 250 shows, episodes and movies worldwide. An international celebrity and one of TV's most popular, shyest sex symbols... "Political" no longer means what it did when we started this blog. It's about transformation and life-saving issues for women: equal pay for equal work...

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Imagine this: every kid and teacher in that school has a gun. Someone is out in the hallway waving a gun around in the air. Everyone rushes out from classrooms to the hallway, waving their guns. WHO IS THE ORIGINAL GUNMAN? If everyone has a gun, who's the bad guy?

To the NRA and opponents of gun control: what's wrong with Tasers instead of guns? If you really are in fear and need to protect yourself, then have a taser handy. This way it's not permanent.

Americans should have to pass eye tests, firearms classes, and metamphetamine tests, blood tests, even psychological testing (and see if they're on medications for depression or using psychotropic drugs) and be licensed BEFORE they can buy a gun.

It probably would not hurt at all to also have every applicant interviewed by someone trained to spot personality disorders, such as the kind that were so obvious to anyone who knew the mass murderer to be at Virginia Tech. The faculty there had already reported him to local police as a possible lunatic. And yet he was allowed to just walk into a gun store, where other murder weapons had been purchased, and walk out with a gun. There is something very broken about a system that failed to stop this.

For God's sake and for our children's sake, there have only been 24 justified shootings in America - versus THOUSANDS of "accidental" and rampage shootings, as a result of our lax gun laws.

In every other country where they have strict gun control, gun deaths are down.

Every day they try to fill us with fear. "The terrorists are coming over here to get us," they say. And why WOULDN'T the terrorists want to come to Virginia, for example? Why they've got some of the most lax gun laws anywhere, where even a deranged non-citizen can freely buy a high-powered assault weapon. And its not just people from overseas, criminals from all over the eastern seaboard come to Virginia in particular to buy their guns, so they can go commit crimes in other states.

The blood had not even dried on the classroom floors of Virginia Tech before the NRA launched its own offensive, in the media and in email blasts, to argue that what we really need to do is turn all our teachers into pistol packing sheriffs, and our colleges into something out of the wild west. There are only two categories of people who oppose any kind of gun regulation, lobbyists for the gun manufactures themselves, and people with personal Rambo fantasies. And the latter are possibly the LAST people who should be armed with deadly force.

The fact is that for every private citizen with the skill and JUDGEMENT to effectively intervene against someone else shooting a gun, there are many more Rambos in their own mind who would end up getting even more people killed including themselves. For every gun in a home used for successful defense against an attacker, there are many, many more used in suicides, or killing by accident, or end up stolen. Those are the statistics and they don't lie. You remember Marvin Gaye, don't you? He was killed in a family argument by his own father with a gun he bought for his father's protection.

It has never been enough to be a law-abiding citizen to be armed with a lethal weapon. With gun rights come gun responsibilities. You must be trained to use a weapon responsibly. And nobody should be able to purchase such a weapon unless they can first demonstrate this, any more than someone should be allowed to drive a car without at least first passing a driving test, together with an eye exam and a written test. They passed a law in the last Congress that said you were required to attend a special class before you could declare bankruptcy. Why not also to own a gun?

Having more guns in this country in the hands of people who can't handle them doesn't make us more safe. It makes us all LESS safe. Many of the guns already in the hands of criminals were originally sold legally (though perhaps under the most feeble of laws), and the more our society is awash with guns, the more guns criminals will get, to steal if they have to. The more guns the NRA can sell us, the more they will tell us we need to buy to "protect" ourselves from the ones already sold. What a deadly, murderous racket. Read more and take action at: http://www.peaceteam.net/gun_regulation.php TELL CONGRESS WE NEED STRONGER FEDERAL GUN REGULATIONS

No laymen, except the VERY INSECURE weaklings, need a gun that can kill people. Tasers stun the criminal and stop him in his tracks. Then you can take him to court and find out why he's doing what he's doing.

WE need to disarm all the criminals. In this day and age, with the stress of our society, the traffic, the job insecurity, the machines we're plugged into, the fear-mongering, the pharmaceutical drugs people are popping -- NOW MORE THAN EVER I DO NOT WANT NERVOUS PEOPLE TO HAVE GUNS IN THEIR HANDS.

The ENLIGHTENED, HARMONIOUS, long view is to work together to heal the ills of our society, tone down the desperation and the attraction to violence, and help us understand each other's tragedy. Truly damaged people should not be able to buy guns.

This kid was a ticking time bomb; his English teacher knew it. Why didn't someone put out an alert via his Driver's license, warning gun shop owners not to sell this kid GUNS!

People should prove why they need a gun; hunting licenses aside, they should be tested thoroughly before owning a weapon that can kill a human being.

2007 NATIONAL REPORTING

For a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs Awarded to Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe for his revelations that President Bush often used "signing statements" to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.

The most heinous instance of a law Bush usurped was the Geneva Convention's ban on torture of human beings. Bush secretly signed his "right to torture" thereby breaking the Geneva Convention.

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief...

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit. 'The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/ articles/2006/01/04/bush_could_bypass_new_torture_ban/

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: Maurice Possley and Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune for their investigation of a 1989 execution in Texas that strongly suggests an innocent man was killed by lethal injection, and Les Zaitz, Jeff Kosseff and Bryan Denson of The Oregonian, Portland, for their disclosure of mismanagement and other abuses in federally-subsidized programs for disabled workers, stirring congressional action.

Other items of interest coming up:

On our show this week we are having Mike Weinstein, author of "WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military"

Check out internationally renowned architect William McDonough and his vision of the future: "BUILDINGS LIKE TREES, CITIES LIKE FORESTS" http://www.mcdonough.com/writings/buildings_like_trees.htm